Shoutings of Asutosh Palai

Lately, I have been exploring Lisp, Common Lisp to be more exact and I have seen some of the stuff ways out of imagination. I am going to talk about two such feature here. The next three paragraphs are giving the background of my relationship with programming languages and Lisp. Feel free to skip it and bite directly into the juice. I can code in few languages and they belong to a wide range of paradigms. The first language I learned, in what can be said in depth was Java. I learnt it in my high school and later the deeper stuff in the first year of my college. I have also explored Ruby, Python, C, C++ and a few more languages. Having explored all these somehow made my perception of computer languages different. I could see the good points and bad points of all those languages and only opinion I had about languages are they are made of different kinds of stuff for different reasons and they are beautiful in themselves. And obviously, I either stayed out of language wars or suppor...

A small lore: The legend has it that a Creature was wandering in a dark deep forest. One day, he was commanded by the Great Master to write a bootup code for a dummy kernel. Confused what it was and how to write it, he started reading up old scrolls and searching for ways to complete the task. His research made him realise that he needed to write something called a 'boot sector'. He came across many guides and books on Operating Systems, but they all started with the kernel using some other boot loader. Then he came across a magic scroll which showed him the right path, enlightening him on his way. Then he successfully finished the task. That night when he was grazing the stars, he recalled that a long time back he had wandered onto a path that lead him to develop a small kernel. He remembered that he had to abandon the path because he took a wrong turn somewhere and was not able to find anyway ahead. Now having written a bootloader, he could now vaguely see the mistakes h...